Carrie Mae Weems: Race, Gender, and Photography

Introduction: The Moynihan Report and Weems's Counternarrative

The 1965 Moynihan Report was not the first government report to blame Black Americans for the very factors that condition their lives. An unintended contribution of the report was that it articulated precisely what many Americans thought at the time — putting those biases down in black and white, plain as day. The instability of Black families was named as the cause of the "deterioration" of African American life. Carrie Mae Weems had been using photography to tell racial narratives for five years, since the time she received her first camera as a gift at the age of 20. Her story of Black family life stood as a direct counterpoint to the Moynihan Report — also rendered in black and white — accompanied by an oral history of the everyday life of Weems's own multigenerational family.

Confronting Stereotypes Through Photography

Using the stereotypical currency embedded in the Moynihan Report, Weems addressed prejudice head on. The Moynihan Report was a maze of statistics, tables, and indexes — easy enough for the uninitiated to lose their way. In contrast, Weems's subsequent bodies of work offered a clear trail of breadcrumbs back to the source of "the deterioration": a long, continuous history of racism. She took studio photographs of models behaving in stereotypical fashion, such as her Black Man Holding Watermelon. Weems also constructed still-life arrangements of decorative objects with racial themes, including salt-and-pepper shakers painted to look like Mammy and Sambo, and a figure of a uniformed bell captain. An unflinching exhibit held in 1989–90 featured portraits of Black children photographed in the style of mug shots, all tinted with monochromatic color — evoking reflection on skin-color variation among Black people and its association with social hierarchical status among those who have internalized such racial distinctions.

The Agassiz Daguerreotypes and Feminist-Racial Narrative

Some of Weems's strongest evidentiary work chronicles the racial argument of Louis Agassiz, the Harvard scientist who attempted to prove his ill-conceived theory of Black people as an inferior and separate race. The photographs are presented as "evidential specimens, nothing more," and were drawn entirely from found sources — in particular, an 1850 archive of daguerreotype images from South Carolina depicting African-born enslaved people. Women figure prominently in these photographs, largely because of the many different roles that enslaved women played in their captive lives. For women more than men, the functional lines between Black slaves and the lowest-class white people were blurred. Black women worked within a quasi-intimate ecosystem that permitted entry into the private realm of the households where they were enslaved. The bare-breasted women in the daguerreotype images are objectified in ways that the men are not. Because of this, the inclusion of women in the series carries a feminist narrative — undeniably so — but the photographs are also inextricably fused with the encompassing racial narrative. Weems created a timeless, quasi-anthropological pictorial essay with the capacity to feel fresh for each subsequent exhibit.

Conclusion: Beyond Category

When following the work of a woman artist, it is easy to take up the pieces of her work and define them as feminist. This is particularly true when portions of a body of work are autobiographical or, as in Weems's situation, self-portraits. A distinct advantage of having access to a retrospective covering more than thirty years is that a level of perspective becomes available simply through exposure to the evolution of the artist's work over several decades. Weems's body of work has at times focused on the issues facing women, has frequently addressed race, and has occasionally examined the specific concerns of women of color. The diversity of voice and portrayal that Weems has demonstrated over her career makes it impossible to categorize her work within any single frame of reference — other than the universality of human interactions skewed by prejudice, greed, power, and identity.